Hearing Aid : Soundproofing Muffles Plane Noise in Homes Near LAX

A little peace and quiet never came easy to Cecil McAllister and his family.

Talk around the dinner table stopped and the TV’s sound was cranked up each time a jet leaving Los Angeles International Airport roared over his El Segundo home.

“Particularly in the summertime, if you left a window open or even if you didn’t, you were drowned out by the noise,” said McAllister, a retired sheet metal shop manager.

“If you were having a conversation . . . you just stopped until it passed.”

Three years ago, life became more tranquil for McAllister and 19 other homeowners near LAX when their residences were soundproofed by the airport as part of an experimental program. As a result, airport officials report, noise levels inside 15 homes were cut by half. In the remaining five, which were less noisy to begin with, the noise level dropped, airport officials said, but not by as much.

“It really changed our whole lives,” said 67-year-old Mavis Austin, who lives a couple of blocks away from McAllister and who, along with him, was chosen from among 243 volunteers to participate in the project.

Encouraged by the experiment’s results, LAX recently approved plans to move ahead with its final phase: the soundproofing of 33 apartment units in El Segundo and 16 homes in Playa del Rey. Eventually, the airport hopes to also soundproof 20 apartment units in Lennox before calling an end to the experiment.

Self-Help Guide

The airport, which is required under state law to try to reduce high noise levels in residential areas next to it, wants communities around LAX to use the technical and practical know-how gleaned from the experiment to start their own soundproofing programs. Federal funds for such projects became available under the 1982 Airport and Airways Improvement Act.

“We are not a soundproofing agency, and no one has asked us to go into their community and soundproof for them,” said Robert Beard, who oversees the airport’s noise mitigation programs. “We are trying to create a cookbook so (the communities) can give it to the chef.”

The drawback to the technology used in the 20 homes is that the residences are noisy if a window or door is left open, and the work is expensive. For the 20 homes soundproofed in 1985, the average cost was $18,000.

Already, El Segundo officials are putting together an application for a share of the money, which comes from a fund generated primarily by an 8% tax on airline tickets. Planning Director Lynn Harris predicted the city would file its application with the Federal Aviation Administration, which allocates the money, within two or three months.

Harris estimated that the city could apply for more than $7 million over the next decade to soundproof homes using the knowledge developed under the LAX program. More than 4,000 of the city’s homes and apartments are affected by high levels of aircraft noise and qualify for soundproofing paid for with federal funds, she said.

“The information developed by the airport is up to the minute, state of the art,” Harris said. “It’s all the backup material we need to make our application.”

The federal funds will also pay 80% of the cost of the final phase of LAX’s experiment; the airport will pay the remaining 20%. The work is expected to cost about $1 million, excluding more than $300,000 the airport will pay to El Segundo-based Wyle Laboratories to develop architectural and other plans.

Navigational Easement

In exchange for having their homes soundproofed in the LAX experiment, homeowners must give the airport a navigational easement over their property--a condition that a handful of property owners who were approached about participating in the experiment have balked at. By granting the airport an easement, residents give up the right to sue over noise problems.

Dave Brown, an acoustical engineer with Wyle Laboratories, estimated that more than 20 airports nationwide are pursuing soundproofing programs in varying degrees. A major reason for the airports’ interest has been the availability of the federal funds to carry out the projects, he said.

LAX, one of the busiest airports in the country, was one of the first to pursue soundproofing as a solution to residential noise, Brown said. An estimated 28,000 apartments and homes surrounding the airport fall within a so-called contour, where noise levels are considered too high for residences, he said. In 1985, Wyle calculated that construction costs alone to soundproof the homes would be about $184 million.

Unlike the United States, soundproofing of homes near airports has been common in Europe for years, Brown said. Homes near airports such as London’s Heathrow typically are built of brick and have clay-tile roofs, he said. Both provide good soundproofing.

By contrast, homes around LAX and other airports in this country overwhelmingly tend to have wood frames and roofs made of composite tile nailed to plywood, he said. Both are poor insulators.

While it might cost $1,000 to soundproof a home in England, a wood-frame home here could cost $8,000 or more, Brown said. “There has always been the question of whether it is feasible to sound-insulate such structures” because of the cost, he said.

LAX began its soundproofing experiments in 1969 on three airport-owned homes in Playa del Rey. The oceanfront homes were under flight paths and had been condemned by the airport because of noise.

The homes provided engineers with their guinea pigs, and various building materials were used in an effort to determine what would work to soundproof a home. “The homes were an actual laboratory and we tried everything we could think of to develop techniques,” recalled John Kaytor, an architect with Wyle.

Kaytor said engineers probably tended to “overkill” at times in their search for answers. For example, inch-thick window glass proved impractical. “You had to have a forklift to get them in place,” he said.

The experiments continued on 20 more homes in several communities around the airport, many of which have since been moved or torn down, Kaytor said. In the early 1980s, armed with the experiment’s results and other information in subsequent years, Wyle developed techniques that could be widely applied.

Essentially, those techniques include replacing a home’s single-pane windows with double panes that are thicker and spaced about three inches apart. Additional walls several inches thick are sometimes built inside existing ones, and ventilation systems that eliminate holes where noise can creep into a home are installed. Hollow doors are replaced with solid ones. On Mavis Austin’s home, for example, workers installed a 200-pound oak front door.

The decrease in noise meant the residents could talk to one another or use the telephone without interference. They also could listen to the radio or television without having to turn up the volume every time a jet flew over.

A Side Benefit

The soundproofing work is done without any significant change in a home’s appearance. And the work has a side benefit: Homeowners report that their heating and air-conditioning bills have dropped considerably.

“I think our heater rarely came on the first year” after the soundproofing work was complete, McAllister said.

At least one resident whose home was used in the experiment questioned the wisdom of spending thousands of dollars for the soundproofing..

William Ostendorf, a 71-year-old Lennox resident, said he spent $6,500 to build his home 40 years ago. More than twice that amount was spent by the airport to soundproof the house.

“I think spending money on this old property is kind of foolish,” said Ostendorf, who moved near LAX when it was still known as Mines Field. Instead of soundproofing homes such as his, the airport should buy the properties and redevelop them for commercial or industrial uses, he said.

Not that he ever intended to leave his home to escape the noise. Even before his home was soundproofed, the jet noise did not bother him that much, he said.

It did not bother McAllister that much, either. Both said that they got used to it after a while.

Before McAllister moved into his present home on Acacia Avenue, he lived in one not far away that also was affected by aircraft noise. He said he never considered moving to another city to get away from the noise. The city’s small-town charm was simply too attractive.

“I couldn’t leave El Segundo,” he said.